These forums appear VERY biased towards XNA Game Studio topics. This is merely because XNA Game studio is a community developer facing API. Microsoft are NOT losing any support for native DirectX, nor are they trying to make all game developers use managed code - if you have a conspiracy theory on the subject then these forums are not the place for it. Some of us even agree with you that all the sign up process and gamertag requirements are excessive - but that's the way it is at the moment.

However since DirectX is targeted toward professional game developers traditionally there has not been much community support from Microsoft and that is reflected by the lack of responses in these forums and the MSDN forums before then. This FAQ aims to help those folk.

• Native DirectX/C++/DirectX 10
  Native/C++ forums. However you may get better support on GameDev.net DirectX forums. For very technical questions you can try the official DirectX-l mailing list but note that this is a high signal to noise list and so newbie questions may not be tolerated as well as on gamedev.net so please start there.
• Managed DirectX
  Official support is in the Native/C++ forums (yes I know that makes no sense but that's where they go). The GameDev.net DirectX forums may also be of help. This technology is still supported since its part of the DirectX 9 SDK - however there has been no active development on the API since 2005 and we do not recommend you use it for new projects unless you have no choice. Either switch to XNA Game Studio, write your own managed wrappers or use one of the community wrappers SlimDX  or MD3D10. Note that these community wrappers are the only DirectX10 path available. Microsoft has no announced plans for DirectX10 managed wrappers.
• DirectDraw/Older versions of DirectX
  There are relatively few folk using these unsupported technologies. One place you may find kindred spirits is on the Indie Gamer Forums. For reasons of compatibility some smaller indie games are built using older technologies. Again the GameDev.net DirectX forums may also be of help.